The Politics of Style
ROSENTHAL, RAYMOND
WRITERS & WRITING The Politics of Style By Raymond Rosenthal During the past week men have slogged their way through malarial jungles, sweated in steaming asbestos factories, groaned beneath the...
...it was a bad empty aeon, devoid of meaning, before feeling returned, bringing in its train the crescendo of his own excitement, the flooding in of his life, the twirling of the kaleidoscope, the orgasm which had been his burden ever since Strauss had she screamed again, he knew himself to be the master, to have entered the fraternity of master practitioners and of rational authoritarians, to have buried for ever the false boundary which had separated him cruelly and senselessly from the Gestapo man to have merged his own identity at last with that of his conquerors he heard Petit grunt and swear, his hand thrust forward again, there was a light noise as if of wind and he saw that Parmelin had fainted...
...Caute writes a peculiarly thick, heavy-breathing, rodomontade prose, and I am a slow reader...
...In the sink, the plates and cups shrieked like frightened pigs...
...I have thus savored each of his inimitable prose ornaments, his thoughtful metaphors, with the care and intensity which I should imagine every writer would like to receive from every reviewer...
...The girl is being tortured with a wine bottle...
...Flanking these figures of blatant romance and cheap fiction are a host of white and Negro characters who, in their varying responses to the crisis in the Congo, embody Caute's conviction that the West is through and all of us, white and Negro, are stumbling toward a lurid blood-bath in which ideas and emotions will fuse to justify the most terrible crimes...
...What's more, these pleasures are achieved for the loftiest possible reasons...
...he also wants to be profound, without any of the equipment for profundity...
...Indeed, one may comb Malraux's novels without ever finding the kind of rhetoric, the hysterical wallowing in violence and torture, that appears in almost every paragraph of Caute's book...
...Caute, in any case to the extent that he has revealed himself in this very long and prolix book, know him so well that I may presume to resort, I feel with ample justice, to that contempt which is often the concomitant of familiarity...
...Caute's borrowings from Man's Fate are less evident and certainly less successful than those from Gone With The Wind...
...but when it comes to what actually happens, he is very vague...
...And not because Caute feels some compunction or squeamishness...
...The curtain must be drawn over such brutally detailed facts, for without that curtain Caute would not be able to enjoy the tortures with quite the same hysterically intense a pleasure...
...From Gone With The Wind he purloins his glamorous heroines and heroes: Zoe Silk, an up-to-date Scarlett O'Hara weaned on a diet of modern literature, such as Camus and Faulkner, an incandescent beauty who pulverizes legions of panting men on three continents and still retains her much-tried virginity...
...Soames Tufton, the suave, gross, Machiavellian Englishman who loves Zoe but loves money even more and talks portentously of a "new humanism" while he engages in filthy maneuvering at the expense of all human values...
...Things and people always shriek, scream, snarl, erupt...
...No, the reason for his reticence lies firmly planted in his style and approach to experience...
...There are many things one could say about it: hurtful, damaging things which might somehow percolate through the carefully nurtured hysteria and apprise him of the dubiousness of his proceeding...
...he could never do anything as clear and powerful...
...Andr?© Laval, the perverted ex-Socialist who succumbed to Gestapo torture during the Resistance period in France and now has turned into a neo-Fascist monster and mercenary-finding both political and sexual fulfillment in torturing beautiful Congolese maidens...
...Malraux's ability to dramatize ideas, to give flesh to ideological motivations and make them an integral part of his drama, would seem to be beyond Caute's powers...
...I have been choosing at random, to give the fine, full flavor of Caute's prose...
...From the volcano of his life red-hot premonitions and anxieties rained down on him- leaping, spastic fears, terrible images of what he had become and how limited was his capacity for change...
...All that he can manage in this sphere is a lifeless aping of the original...
...WRITERS & WRITING The Politics of Style By Raymond Rosenthal During the past week men have slogged their way through malarial jungles, sweated in steaming asbestos factories, groaned beneath the burden of their own flesh and the age's injustice...
...Her scream, delayed as it was by a fraction of a second, upset his balance and caused his hand to waver...
...Caute has fashionably radical views...
...But first of all there is Caute's story...
...It is a curious phenomenon and worthy of some thought...
...I have spent the same period reading David Caute's novel...
...most of these words are used for sexual purposes, to increase the bursting heaviness of the atmosphere, to add the sultriness of turgid prose to the sultriness of the emotions described...
...he can be quite explicit when he wants...
...So he turns on them with a kind of feline nastiness...
...It can be found everywhere today, in the movies, in cheap fiction, in the comic books...
...the novelist is telling us what goes on in the mind of a torturer with a special history and background...
...Why she must go to the hospital quickly can be surmised...
...He also puts Malraux's words, hazily combined with Spengler's orotund pessimism, into the mouth of his mercenary-torturer, Andr?© Laval...
...An alliance between sexual hysteria and political hysteria is thus cemented and celebrated...
...What one detects finally is a distinct dislike, almost a hatred, for writers like Malraux and Camus, who not only have original ideas but also passionate convictions which they expressed with beauty and force in their imaginative works...
...The Decline of the West (Macmillan, 616 pp., $7.95), and I am sure that my attendant anguish and pain have at the least equalled theirs...
...If one reads his book carefully, as I have, one finds all sorts of imitations of Malraux side by side with underhanded, disobliging references to him...
...He is very scientific about that, very detailed...
...The whole torture scene can be surmised, in fact...
...This is the hallmark of all debased romanticism...
...If he had said that the bottle was of such-and such a shape, that it was shoved into such-and-such an orifice, and it produced the following, surgically depicted wounds, he would escape being regarded as a pornographer of violence, which he is, and would at one blow lose his style and his whole reason for existence as a novelist...
...Its form falls somewhere between Gone With The Wind and Man's Fate, borrowing indiscriminately from both these novels their feeblest and most meretricious features...
...My point can only be made by extensive quotation...
...The story stops, the character steps forth, and we get a sophomoric lecture which shows that Caute has boned up properly on his sources, yet is quite incapable of any ideas of his own...
...Caute has read these works and has undoubtedly inwardly despaired...
...He is incapable because, although he would seem to be passionately devoted to the cause of African independence, he does not merely want to be a partisan...
...A panic compounded partly of his growing physical torment and partly of the buried but active psychoses of science fiction and horror films swirled around the dust bowl of his head like snarling leaves in a cyclone...
...Here, for example, is the description of Andr?© Laval torturing a young Congolese girl, assisted in this work by two mercenaries, Petit and Parmelin: "Petit had her pinned now, he bent over her and examined her, it nauseated him, he pressed the rim of the bottle against her flesh, menacingly, he searched her eyes for the butterflies but the wells were empty, her breath billowed up at him strangled and bad, her sounds reminded him [Laval] of his daughter Marie in her cot, a week old and struggling with life, the memory angered him, his arm pressed forward...
...Caute has his arch-villain, Soames Tufton, saying things that sound just like Malraux in his worst, most fustian moments...
...His deft butcher's hand still clutched the antiseptic, Petit tugged at it, the cotton wool had spilled on the floor, Petit's eye caught his own, he looked down and was astonished to discover how seriously his touch had erred and even then his head swam and he could only feel the warmth, the dampness in his own clothes and when Petit began shaking him and repeating, 'Hospital, mon Commandant, hospital, quickly,' he felt only the grief and spent pity of it all that he had been cheated again and that life had been arranged to frustrate at every turn those who followed the arduous path of honor and duty...
...It is not represented...
...I consider it a desecration of the real sufferings and aims of the African people...
...Headlines rushed at him like hungry rats...
...It is Caute's distinction to have introduced this peculiarly disgusting brand of pornography into supposedly serious fiction...
...I know Mr...
...And, in his sincere desire to help the Africans in their struggle for independence, or at least to illuminate their struggle, he has written this huge, explanatory novel...
...But I shall limit myself to one simple point, which seems to have escaped the other reviewers...
...But at the same time that he makes these intimations about Malraux's cultural pronouncements, their role as an ideological justification for neo-Fascism in Europe and Africa, he writes a novel which, in its grisly, cheap mixture of sex, politics and the sexual politics of torture, would be utterly antipathetic to Malraux's imagination, however romantically suspect its roots may be...
...He has taken the facts of the recent Congo troubles-the mining interests, the mercenaries sent in by Belgian capitalists, the national movement among the Congolese, the crisscross of international finance and politics-to fashion a kind of adventure story, full of tortures, sexual escapades, ideological discussions, riots, high-level intrigue, and apocalyptically harrowing death and destruction...
...Nervous tension worked in James like an aphrodisiac...
Vol. 49 • November 1966 • No. 22
